AMERICAN NATURALIST: John Burroughs (Author of Camping And Tramping With President Roosevelt)

John Burroughs (Author of Camping And Tramping With President Roosevelt)





AMERICAN NATURALIST
John Burroughs
born: April 03, 1837 in Catskill Mountains near Roxbury, N.Y., United States


About this author

John Burroughs (April 3, 1837-March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement. According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. 

By the turn of the century he had become a virtual cultural institution in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own.

His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.

In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs's special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world."

The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.



QUOTES:

“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”
― John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature


  

“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
― John Burroughs

 

“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: ‘To rise above little things’.”
― John Burroughs

“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”
― John Burroughs


 

“A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
― John Burroughs

 If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature....”
― John Burroughs

“To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. ”
― John Burroughs

 

“A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.”
― John Burroughs

“How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”
― John Burroughs


  

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”
― John Burroughs

“Leap and the net will appear”
― John Burroughs

“Look underfoot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don't despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.”
― John Burroughs

“Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.”
― John Burroughs, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Natural World of John Burroughs

“The longer I live the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and wonder of the world… I have loved the feel of the grass under my feet, and the sound of the running streams by my side. The hum of the wind in the treetops has always been good music to me, and the face of the fields has often comforted me more than the faces of men. I am in love with this world...I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvest, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.”
― John Burroughs

“The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
”
― John Burroughs

“For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice.”
― John Burroughs

“The lesson which life constantly repeats is to 'look under your feet.'
You are always nearer to the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive.
The great opportunity is where you are.
Do not despise your own place and hour.
Every place is under the stars.
Every place is the center of the world.”
― John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature


  

“It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative”
― John Burroughs

“I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.”
― John Burroughs, The writings of John Burroughs

“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.”
― John Burroughs

“The secret of happiness is something to do”
― John Burroughs

“Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.”
― John Burroughs

“...to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or a wild flower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.”
― John Burroughs

Books by John Burroughs

• Camping And Tramping With President Roosevelt
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• Signs & Seasons
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• Accepting the Universe
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• Deep Woods